Tag Archive:
studying for the lsat

There are some pursuits in life that are so labor-intensive and time-consuming that they quickly end up occupying most of your brain-space. Studying for the LSAT is, not surprisingly, one of those things – and as I’ve recently discovered, training for a marathon is another. (Oh, you didn’t know I’m training for a marathon? We must not have had a conversation lasting more than 30 seconds in the last couple months.)

The thing about these niche, life-occupying activities is that people who aren’t doing that thing just don’t get it. Sure, they might understand that you’re spending a lot of time on something you really care about – but they probably don’t know (or even want to know) much more than that. So here is my ode to not-having-a-life (for goal-related reasons):

When I was getting ready for the LSAT, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with my friends. Most of the time, I was either doing homework, taking practice tests, or thinking about the disastrous consequences of performing poorly on the test. Consequently, I wasn’t a whole lot of fun to hang out with for about three months. Here are a few of the things my friends had to suffer through:

1.) Fallacies, Fallacies Everywhere

After we covered the lesson on logical fallacies, my instructor told me to practice finding examples of flawed reasoning in everyday life. Now, he didn’t tell me to point out those flaws to my friends every time they committed one… I decided to do that all on my own. If you ever want to really test a friendship, gleefully point and laugh at someone after accusing them of fallaciously relying on an ad hominem argument.

If you’re studying for the LSAT, you’ve probably begun to notice that the test loves to ask questions regarding flaws in Logical Reasoning. At first, these flaws can seem somewhat ethereal and abstruse, but in time they will become clearer. One way that I practiced recognizing flaws was by noticing their prevalence in popular culture. This post will focus on the flawed reasoning directed toward a lightning rod figure in pop culture — Johnny Manziel.

Johnny Manziel LSAT Flaw #1: Ad Hominem

Ad Hominem flaws arise when someone attacks the arguer rather than the argument itself. For example, if I said that Donald Trump is wrong about L’Oreal products being superior to other hair care products because he himself has almost no natural hair left (or because he uses Dove products), then I would be guilty committing this type of flawed reasoning.

Misery loves company, as they say, so if you have a friend who is also studying for the LSAT you’ve probably already discovered the joys of commiserating about the devious questions created for you by LSAC.

That’s all well and good, but perhaps you and your friend have decided to take your relationship to the next level. Perhaps you’re ready to take the leap and start – yep, you guessed it – studying together.

First of all, you’ll want to find a quiet location. Light some candles. Put on some mood music and open a bottle of wine – wait, scratch that last part. In all seriousness, even though studying with a friend might involve more talking than your normal studying, you’ll still want to find a relatively quiet place to work. You’ll likely be spending a fair amount of time working on questions independently, so it’s important that you’re able to concentrate.

When I was an undergraduate, I decided it would be a good idea to see how quickly I could eat one of Taco Bell’s 12-taco boxes (one of my friends had finished a box in under 10 minutes, and I am never one to back down from a challenge). About halfway through, I regretted my decision. I wasn’t going quickly enough and I was starting to feel sick — simply put, I wasn’t getting the results I wanted.

If you’re in a similar position with your June LSAT prep — you are taking too long and missing questions you feel like you shouldn’t be — don’t give up. The June LSAT is over a month away and there is plenty of time to see drastic improvements; here are a few tips to help make the most of your study time and start seeing the results you want.

Scoring high on the LSAT and at Coachella mean totally different things, but this past weekend I discovered that some things LSAT prep and some things Coachella are totally the same!

Picture a Venn diagram. It’s easy. I do it all the time. Label one circle LSAT prep and the other Coachella. In the narrow football shaped cross-section of the LSAT prep slash Coachella Venn diagram, I found the following nuggets of wisdom:

How the LSAT is Like Coachella I: You will lose track of your friends

At some point, despite your best efforts, friends you fully intended to hang out with go unseen for vast swathes of time.

At Coachella, your inseparable crew will separate and go off in different directions.

You’ve probably heard this oft-repeated mantra of LSAT studying: no outside knowledge on the LSAT!

And yet, once you get into the nitty-gritty, it seems a little more complicated – after all, the LSAT doesn’t spell everything out for you. Assumptions that are and are not permissible is a continual source of confusion for my students, which has led to many an in-depth discussion. I’m getting tired of having to settle these disagreements via one-on-one cage match, so I wrote this post: the definitive guide to permissible assumptions on the LSAT. (It’s a two-parter, so make sure to check out the LSAT blog next week for advice on what you CAN assume.)

Part I: What you’re NOT allowed to assume on the LSAT

The LSAT doesn’t require any specialized knowledge of certain subjects, and in fact, if you have specialized knowledge you should probably try to temporarily forget it.

I think Jobs would not have done very well on his first practice LSAT. After all, when he was diagnosed with cancer he consulted a psychic instead of getting the surgery his doctor recommended. So, I would put Jobs’s first practice LSAT score at around a 140.

However, I do think Jobs’s final LSAT score, after considerable practice (and maybe a few psychic séances), would be much higher. He’d probably end up with an LSAT score somewhere in the 160s. This is because your final LSAT score is largely determined by how well you deal with adversity, and Jobs did this very well.